


heads bowed in reverence to obscure gods

by scioscribe



Category: True Detective
Genre: Cults, Gen, Metaphysics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-09
Updated: 2014-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-08 04:38:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1926903
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“I’m trying to put together whether we’re living on the ashes of something we burned down and sometimes they drift up—”</p><p>“Ashes.  Now it’s ashes.  A second ago it was rotten ice.”</p><p>“—and that’s all I’m seeing, or whether there’s something alive, a Leviathan, moving under all that, or whether I’m just losing my fucking mind.  And that’s not a determination you can help me make.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	heads bowed in reverence to obscure gods

**Author's Note:**

> Lingering cult remnants, intimacy, talky metaphysics, evil as a fundamentally dead force, and good as something livelier and better (the light's winning). All relevant King in Yellow mythos cheerfully lifted from Robert Chambers.

Rust went in to pay for gas and get Marty a package of those bright orange cheddar-and-peanut-butter crackers and that was when he saw them all lined up along the back windowsill like churchgoers hunched over in their pew: a row of devil’s traps. He forgot the crackers. The guy at the cash register had the blandest face in America.

“That’ll be thirty-seven fifty.”

Rust paid; forgot the company card that Marty said they should use for this kind of thing and used his own instead. He signed the receipt and then left it on the counter.

Out in the car, he jerked the seat back until he was half-a-foot deeper in the car than Marty and put his head down between his knees. Breath in and out, too thin and too fast. The scar on his stomach hot like a brand.

Marty put a hand on the back of Rust’s neck. Rust slid forward in his seat, cramping himself, shoving his knees up in his face for that better angle, so Marty wouldn’t break his arm trying to soothe his head-fucked partner through what he dimly recognized as a panic attack.

“Hospital? 911?”

Rust shook his head and Marty took it as him throwing off the touch and so then Rust had to grab Marty’s wrist and put his hand back, which at least was a distraction. “No. Talk to me.”

“All I can think about is whether or not you’re having a heart attack.”

“I’m not having a heart attack, Marty, fucking _talk_ to me, anything.”

Marty made a series of false starts, all _ums_ and tongue-clicks, and then he said, “In fourth grade, I told everybody I was an orphan. If the guy in the gas station said something to you to set all this off, I’m going to go in there and beat the living shit out of him. I get kind of worried about my toenails because when my dad got older his toenails got all weird. When you first showed up at CID, before we met, I thought for sure you were some high-priced gigolo someone had pulled in. One time I called Audrey and hung up before she could answer because I didn’t want to know if she’d see me on the caller ID and the phone would do that thing, you know, where it goes to voicemail after two rings. Maisie always answers, but she always sounds busy. I never wanted to talk to my parents on the phone either, you know, so I can say it’s the same thing. I liked your hair better when it was short.”

Rust lifted his head up slowly and this time Marty kept his hand in place.

“I don’t think I’m gonna ask you to talk again anytime soon,” Rust said. His voice was hoarse.

“Yeah, well, now you know how other people feel opening your can of worms up accidentally.”

Rust had the idea Marty thought he went around spouting philosophy to everyone he met. He didn’t. In 1995 he had tattooed his colors into his skin, not worn them openly—he had told Marty and he had told Maggie. Years later, when it had seemed important to not give a shit, he had used his theories of human nature to make weeds that someone else would have to cut through or pull up. But Marty thought Rust talked to other people like Rust talked to him, and he didn’t. Never had. Never would.

Marty said, “You want to talk to me about what happened in there?”

Jesus and Santeria. It could’ve been nothing. “Later, maybe.”

Marty nodded and started the car back up. “You’ll notice,” he said graciously, “that I’m not saying anything about the fact that you came back without crackers.”

“Yeah,” Rust said. “I appreciate that.”

*

Then it was a woman with freckles all over her face. She worked for an insurance company and wanted Rust and Marty to follow up a few personal-injury claims she thought didn’t smell right. She was wearing capped sleeves because of the heat and when she reached across their desk to get a pen to sign the contract, the fabric rode up and Rust could see a small, blue-inked spiral on her right shoulder.

Or he would be standing in line in the supermarket, trying not to buy beer, trying not to buy cigarettes, consoling himself with packets of gum and toothpicks, and the guy in front of him would be one of those beefy inbred rednecks talking too loudly to his buddy about the game last night, and then his voice would drop and Rust would hear him say, “Black stars.”

Or the little girl with corn-silk hair who stared fixedly at him from the other booth in the diner. “I know you,” she mouthed finally, exaggeratedly, gulping the words like a fish. Then she drew a finger across her throat.

Marty had said they’d never get all of them, but more and more Rust felt like the state was riddled with them, the way a house could be riddled with termites.

“We’re living on rotten ice,” Rust said, “and sooner or later, we’re going to fall through.”

“You mind elaborating on that?”

But he did mind, because he hadn’t meant to say it—there’d been a time when he’d said nothing by accident but living with Marty had drugged his lips so that sometimes things slipped out. The problem was that for Marty all of it was over, just like all of it had been over with Reggie Ledoux and the jungle-green of that flat and mindless no man’s land, and Rust had taken clarity from him once but had trouble doing it a second time. Soft. Getting soft. As eaten through with affection as this land was with corrupt notions.

But if he were right, and he had enough trust in himself to believe that he was, then Marty would fall through that ice with him—what he’d said had been _we_ and not _I_ because, dammit, he didn’t or couldn’t think that way anymore.

So he muted the TV, something he’d been dying to do for over an hour because there was only so long he could watch some other man fix up a car, and said, “I’m trying to put together whether we’re living on the ashes of something we burned down and sometimes they drift up—”

“Ashes. Now it’s ashes. A second ago it was rotten ice.”

“—and that’s all I’m seeing, or whether there’s something alive, a Leviathan, moving under all that, or whether I’m just losing my fucking mind. And that’s not a determination you can help me make.”

“I guess I’d say it’s true I’ve never been an expert in how your mind works.” Marty toyed with the remote like if he turned to the right channel, he’d hit on something that would illuminate it all for them both, the way, he’d told Rust, turning on the radio when you were heartbroken inevitably turned up songs about just that. But he kept the sound off. Rust watched strange faces flicker by like rain. “But I think I’d do better than I have if you spelled it out a little more. What’d we burn down we’re living in the ashes of, again?”

Rust smiled. “Carcosa. The cult.”

“You’re seeing people coming out of the woodwork,” Marty said.

“Yeah.”

“See, look how you used three words and clarified the whole situation for me.” He dug into one of the fussy little couch pillows he had and Rust watched his knuckles disappear into its soft give. “The whole thing makes me antsy.”

“I hadn’t planned on mentioning it to you.”

“And that whole thing makes you an asshole.”

“A lot of things make me an asshole,” Rust said. “If we’ve got time later, I’ll let you enumerate them.”

“I don’t know what to do about what you’re thinking about,” Marty said. “I don’t see the world the way you do, never have. And I’m not troubled by ashes and rotten ice, or whatever you want to call it.”

Notwithstanding, Rust thought, the times he heard Marty yelling out in the middle of the night. But that was Marty’s business. And then again, Marty might not even know.

“But,” Marty said, “you can, you know, tell me shit. If you feel some Leviathan’s wrapping its tentacle around your ankle. Tentacles, right?”

“Depending on the interpretation.”

“I’m gonna say tentacles. You can talk to me.”

Rust pressed _mute_ again and the sound blared back. Revving engines.

“That a yes or no?”

“Yeah,” Rust said.

*

Late nights on oil rigs and fishing boats, he had pressed his fingers to his eyelids until stars and colors that tasted like citrus and smoke had borne into him. Passed the time thinking about antlers, crowns, the color yellow. Didn’t think about Marty. Pointedly jerked off to nothing in particular. Got drunk until his skull seemed to small to live in and the world seemed too big. He charted constellations of iniquity that netted all of Louisiana.

But he always tore that one little hole for Marty to slip through. Not that he suspected everybody—he was a realist, and most people just didn’t have the time or energy to commit evil on such a scale—but he saw himself recognizing an argument to be made in Marty’s disfavor and deliberately chose, every time, not to make it.

Whenever some thought seemed about to crystallize— _was it just the sight of the children that made him kill Ledoux?_ —he would go some other way.

A thousand cups of coffee Marty had handed him over the years. Seven Father’s Days on which he hadn’t mentioned cards or special dinners. Marty following him from room to room when he was turning his skin inside-out to find Crash again. An arrival in ninety seconds. Or, even, to go in some other direction, Marty pinning him against the lockers, the saltwater smell of pussy on his hands right up in Rust’s face. Marty saying he was the only one who had ever taken up for Rust. Whatever dislike was there was too hot and too personal to be anything other than honest.

He’d thought after Sophia that he’d had nothing else to lose, but then there had been Claire and then there had been the unsplintered nature of his thoughts and the clarity with which he had seen the world, all taken away from him. And then there had been Marty. A few moments of calm with Maggie, like sitting at an oasis. And again he had lost.

And then it had turned out, in Alaska, that he’d had one thing left to lose—some memory of Marty Hart not tinctured by suspicion and smoke—and he’d closed his hands around it and held on hard. Because he could not abide that and still be whole.

*

“Everything feels so fragile,” Rust said. They were doing dishes. Palmolive on his hands slick and warm and friendly. “I get worried I’m going to mistake my one bit of solid ground for being like everything else.”

“What’s your solid ground?”

Rust held up a dish. Soapsuds ran down his wrist.

“Yeah,” Marty said. “They’re pretty good plates. They’re the kind where even if you drop ‘em, they won’t break.”

“I throw one to the ground, am I going to find out you were being metaphorical?”

“Well,” Marty said. “You don’t have to start tossing them just to make a point.”

Under the sudsy water, his hand met Rust’s briefly, just skimming it from the side.

*

He dreamed a man with a jackal’s head came and stood next to him while he was in the library. Sour breath on his cheek. “He who kills the King in Yellow takes up his crown,” the jackal said.

“He wasn’t a king,” Rust said. “He was just a man in a long line of men. It didn’t even start with him.”

“And it didn’t end with him,” the jackal-headed man said.

“Why a jackal?” Marty asked when Rust woke up and told him about it.

“I don’t know.” Rust rubbed his eyes. “You fixate on the strangest things.”

He knew because Marty fixated on him and lately he felt like the strangest thing in the world—a man so thin-skinned that a wind made him shiver like he’d been cut, a man who was still and always bedeviled by the things he thought he saw. Strange swatches of color. Persistent worshippers of malignity.

“Look,” Marty said, “if we’re talking about the cult, we’re talking about people last active around Marie Fontenot’s disappearance. 1990, Rust, nineteen-fucking-ninety. What went on in the schools, there’s some give-and-take for the years of it, but we’re taking nineties there, too, so let’s round up, let’s say ninety-five. You and me, man, we only came in after it was almost all over. All those schools closed up. No more videos. After that, you got people with too much power and too much scale to dabble in that shit; after that, they’re just trying to cover it up. And you’ve got Errol Childress, God rest the child he once was. But he was scar tissue, Rust, and everything he did was just—pain from an old wound. And now even that’s gone. Somebody did a lot of preaching and hollering almost twenty years ago and now the echo’s finally died out. Be fucking satisfied with that.”

“Errol Childress was already a grown man when the schools were still open,” Rust said. “And he was sure as shit a man when he coaxed Reggie Ledoux into taking those kids and when he killed Dora Lange. He grew up in that shit and where your timeline is, where Marie Fontenot and all those people are, where the schools are, he’s there, too. He grew up an echo while there was still screaming going on, the screaming of all those women and children. More echoes. And a hell of a lot of live noise. So how do you figure they stopped it? How? They did it for a long, long time, Marty. They worked the blood out of his country like water out of a sponge and they did it for close to forever.”

“People stop believing in things that don’t work,” Marty said. “They burned out on it. It was sadism dressed up with some antlers and after a while they got tired of it, realized all they were doing was raping and murdering.”

Rust exhaled. “Since when have people started getting tired of rape and murder?”

“They got tired of the trappings. There’s only so long you can play dress-up in the woods.”

“You’re talking full-time worship,” Rust said. “You’re talking church on Sundays and Wednesday nights. I’m not saying there’s a lost congregation out there. But what about the true believers who never woke up on time, Marty? What about the half-hearted ones that stopped coming to the service?”

“Not sure I like you comparing the two.”

“That’s what I mean,” Rust said. “That’s what I’m talking about. You get unsettled that I might be blaspheming, even if it’s only in a metaphor, but when’s the last time you were in a church, Marty? Belief—whatever kind of belief it is—lingers.”

“When you were still out,” Marty said.

“What?”

“The last time I was in a church. When you were still out. The chapel at the hospital.” Marty looked at his hands. “People go when they need something.”

Rust pressed his forehead against Marty’s for a minute and was surprised Marty let him.

“So that’s what I’m saying,” Rust said softly. “Not everybody who believes in God, and in a God who’s light, bows his head all the time. I can’t think of one reason why people would be more committed to darkness and a king. But things linger.”

“Bunch of casual Satanists running around is what you’re saying.”

“Not running,” Rust said. “Standing still. Everything in this fucking place just hunkers down and puts out roots.”

*

They went to one of Audrey’s exhibitions. Marty fussed over everything: his tie, Rust’s tie, what time they were supposed to get there, what to say about art.

“Just say you like it,” Rust said.

“She’s gonna know I don’t understand it.”

“You don’t have to understand it. She wants you to like it.”

At the gallery, they walked around, and Marty peered at paintings like they were ships coming over the horizon and he was out a telescope, his whole face resolved into working them out: Rust felt a kind of tenderness for him that left his hands feeling empty, somehow. He drifted away a little and found himself away from the crowd.

The pictures he fell in with there were all shades of black and indigo. He stood with his hands in his pockets and looked at the spirals in them for a long time. The spirals and the threads of yellow.

“These are the astronomy ones,” Audrey said from behind him. “They’re not popular.”

Rust touched the frame.

“You’re not really supposed to do that,” she said.

“If I were to ask you what you knew about Carcosa—”

She came around to the side of him. He’d sat across from her at a hundred dinners of varying awkwardness over the years and it seemed to him that he’d hardly ever seen her standing up. She moved gracefully, like water. She said, “I wish we could smoke in here but it ruins the paint.” She touched the frame, too, following his fingerprints. “You leave behind oils, everywhere you touch. It’s destructive. I don’t think of the frame as part of the piece, but other people do, and whenever you touch it, you contribute a little to it eventually breaking down. I like that. It’s poetic. But I’d rather it happen later, not sooner.” She took her hand away. “My dad’s worried about you.”

“Your dad worries about a lot of things, I’m usually one of them.”

Her smile had too much history in it. “Yeah. Me too. I’m not a fan of it either. He’s not good at it.”

“Better now.”

“I don’t need him to be good at it now.”

“I still do,” Rust said.

She nodded, accepting that. “We never thought it was real. Carcosa. Or we thought it was real the way—the way you think the inevitable heat death of the universe is real. Too far away to make any difference. But yeah, we got high, we talked about crowns. Pale faces. _Black the stars in lost Carcosa_. One time we smeared ashes over the bumper of the car and drove it west as fast as we could, thinking something would happen. But we were pretty stoned.”

“Who’s we?”

Audrey rolled her eyes. “Everybody, Rust. Everybody. Somebody’s dad told him. It got around. It was edgy. We didn’t know what it was really about.”

“Somebody must have known.”

“Nobody I knew. We just liked the sound of it.”

“And you painted it,” Rust said.

“Sure. Hard not to think about it now. That I was seventeen and drunk and thinking about getting one of those fucking spirals tattooed on my shoulder to piss off Dad. And all those people dying, over all those years. I thought if I painted it out I’d forget about it.”

“Did you?”

“I’m going to go ahead and guess you know the answer to that,” Audrey said.

Marty came up then, with a look on his face of almost reckless happiness, the kind Rust wanted to shelter so it didn’t get smashed. “Look at that,” he said. “Two of my favorite people right in one spot. Avoiding the spotlight.” He looked at the Carcosa paintings and Rust knew they didn’t come together under his eyes, that the spirals stayed swirls of paint and the yellow never recalled to mind a crown. “I like this,” he said carefully. “Really nice, Audrey.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she said. “Rust said you guys were thinking you might want one of the ones over there.”

“The blue ones?”

“I’m not _marketing_ them that way, but yeah, the blue ones.”

“Yeah, real pretty,” Marty said. “I liked those a lot, honey. Actually,” a little sheepish now, like it was a risk to come out with something other than banal approval, “they reminded me of you. When we went to Florida when you were little and you said you liked the ocean best at night.”

Audrey was quiet. She was looking at Marty with an expression so primitive, in its way, that Rust even recognized it from Sophia. He didn’t know what any of them did to deserve such a love or what made these girls strong enough to hold onto it without throwing it away. He knew she would never tell Marty about Carcosa. What he wondered about was how she knew he would do the same. What look she saw on his face.

*

“You want to move?” Marty asked him one day. “Get away from it all?”

“It’d still be here.”

Marty picked at the bone of his pork chop like it would be worth it to just get one more shred of meat off it. “I was still here before when you left.”

“That was different.” When he closed his eyes now, he saw Audrey driving recklessly in a car with smudges of black ash trailing behind her, and it was somehow more bearable than anything else that had played across the darkness for him in the last few months. “I’m trying to think how we learn to live with what bothers us. Like you assimilate the past, or the evil in the world, like your body would learn to live around a bullet that can’t be taken out.”

“There’s always been bad in the world, Rust. You just got hung up on this particular kind. Every other breed, you learned to live with long ago.”

“That an insult?”

“Just a prediction that you’ll get your skin around this one, too,” Marty said. The overhead kitchen lamp fell warmly against the side of his face and cast him in all different shades of gold. “I’ve got faith in you.”

*

The next day, he went back to the gas station with the devil’s traps, left Marty home alone trying to set up the new TV. He sat in the car smoking for a minute and then figured fuck it.

The guy inside was the same guy. He made Rust’s change over with the same patience.

“You know who I am?” Rust said.

The guy was chewing tobacco. He spat into a red plastic cup before answering. “Everybody around here knows who you are. You don’t exactly blend.”

“Too much to blend into.” He moved nickels and dimes over to his hand slowly, one by one. “When I first moved here, people asked me about church, and God, like it was foregone I’d have an opinion on both. I did, but not the one they wanted. Do you?”

“Everybody’s got opinions.”

Rust pointed to the traps lined up on the window sill. “Those your opinions?”

The man picked one up. “I thought the idea was to trap the devil and keep him. Like you could slash-and-burn some woodland, make good soil, you could concentrate things—hold them—and that would matter for the world. And then they said that I was trying to catch smoke. The devil like he had red skin and horns. No: a face like a mask, a face like he could be anybody, but squashed up, wrong somehow, blanched out, the most colorless thing there was. Yellow. You pick yellow, but it doesn’t mean anything. He’s nothing, ruling over everything, they said. And he would turn the lights to darkness. But he was so far away, they told me, that it didn’t matter. The best we could do was stand in the court for a while and feel that air, so cold, on our skin. Sometimes I did. I didn’t do anything worth mentioning otherwise but sometimes I thought I understood the nature of the world. So I put up those, like a reminder of what you can grab and what you can’t. Like these little spots of devilry are all there are in the world. Not what I know.”

He spat tobacco again.

“If you want to arrest me, arrest me. I’m sure I did something back then. I was high out of my fucking skull.”

“Thought it was nothing worth mentioning.”

“There’s not much I do think worth’s mentioning,” the guy said. “But you wanted to know. I knew him. Childress. The boy.”

“He was a man when I killed him.”

“Wasn’t always.”

“I don’t arrest people anymore,” Rust said.

The man stuffed another napkin down into his spit cup. “Then get the fuck out.”

No panic attack that time, but he sat looking at the whitish remains of dead bugs on the windshield before he started the car again. He drove home to Marty, who had the TV up and wanted Rust to know they’d be watching football all night and fuck him if he thought otherwise.

“I talked to somebody,” Rust said. “You remember the gas station we went to that one time?”

“Do I remember the gas station where I thought you were gonna have a stroke in the parking lot. Yeah, Rust. I think it’s stuck with me. You went _back_?”

He didn’t know why Marty was surprised. He’d gone back everywhere he’d ever been, except to Texas: the place where Sophia had died the one place he trusted to be a black hole that would never let him out again.

“I went back,” Rust said. He told Marty the story, such as it was. Then he went to the fridge and got them each another beer. “I was thinking tomorrow, if you wanted, we could go fishing.”

“Let me get this straight,” Marty said. “You finally talk face-to-face—”

“He didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know,” Rust said. He watched condensation form along the edge of the aluminum can. “Everything he knew about was—that thing larger than us that’s worse than us that we duck into, time to time, and come out drenched and shivering. Shivering like earthquakes that sometimes takes longer to resolve. The _sourness_ of things. That’s what they believed in. That’s nothing new. They grappled with it the wrong way, that’s all. But we touched whatever bad there was, capital-B bad, capital-E evil, we touched it, we knew it was there. They just tried to touch it more often. Live in it. But there’s no metaphysics there that’s anything different than what we already had.”

“Speaking for myself,” Marty said, “I don’t know that I’ve given much thought to the metaphysical side of things.”

“When you needed to,” Rust said quietly.

“That was different.” There was a flush hot along Marty’s cheekbones, like it was unfair of Rust to remind him of the hospital’s chapel and its quiet white walls. “That was the bright side. You’re talking about darkness.”

“I said metaphysics. The last thing I said.”

“Well.” Marty drank. “Forgive me for getting tangled.”

“Forgiveness,” Rust said, “would be one of the things I was going to get to. Love.” He looked away. “Whatever there was at the end. He didn’t know anything about that. We know better. So it doesn’t matter.”

There was no way to tell of the knife shredding the muscles in his stomach without telling of what had come after, of Sophia and his father in the darkness that was nothing more than dark, warm light. It would have been as meaningless, as lifeless, as a gallery of Audrey’s Carcosa pictures without the blue ones of the nighttime sea. Without her looking at Marty that way. And Rust drew, more and more these days, and knew the value of shades, thought that if the cultists had picked up his pencil, they would never have drawn a picture of Marty he would have recognized. Planes of light intersecting with darkness. Stars.

To look at them and see those downturned heads and from that draw some dark picture of what they worshiped without seeing first those dirt-stained human napes, vulnerable, wasn’t how he saw the world anymore. In the end they hadn’t had any secrets. They had been him. And he was no longer that version of himself.

There was nothing to be afraid of, then. He couldn’t even remember how he had been.

He tried to explain all that to Marty, who eventually held up a hand and said he was sure he was too drunk to get it, but it sure as shit _sounded_ like Rust was saying the world was mixed-up good and bad. Was that it? Just that?

“I didn’t say it was original,” Rust said.

“We can go fishing,” Marty said, heaving himself up from his chair. “But if you get me up before eight in the morning I’m gonna have to shoot you.” But on his way upstairs, he stopped by Rust’s chair and cupped one hand to Rust’s face unsteadily, his fingers hot on Rust’s ear. Said, “You were always one of the better parts of the world.”


End file.
